‘Destiny 2’ Player Numbers And Sales Are Rocketing Up Ahead Of ‘The Final Shape’

Bungie has only one job right now: getting people to play Destiny 2’s latest Light and Dark expansion, The Final Shape, which releases in just over a week. It appears they have accomplished this mission.

Currently, Destiny 2 has attracted an extremely healthy player base in the run-up to the expansion’s launch and is selling enough content to top the Steam charts.

Destiny 2 has now become a staple in the Top 10 most played games on Steam, often boasting over 100,000 competitors per night, despite the fact that its current season, Season of the Wish, was set to launch in November 2023 .

Credit of course goes to Bungie’s mid-season update “Into the Light”, which notably introduced the Onslaught activity in horde mode and the ultra-endgame Pantheon challenge. It also took over two of Destiny 2’s highest-vaulted Exotic missions and introduced three new Crucible maps.

As such, the increase in players and their subsequent retention has been remarkable. With the launch of Into the Light, the number of Destiny 2 players more than doubled on Steam overnight, and over the past two months, it has only increased. upper overall, rather than decreasing after an initial surge. The game now looks set to eclipse Lightfall’s all-time record of 316,750 concurrent players at The Final Shape’s launch if we already do 100,000 parties right now.

Then there are sales, where Destiny 2, technically a “free” offering on Steam, is the best-selling game on the service in terms of revenue, with only CS2 occasionally beating it, but it’s a game with huge internal economy of cosmetics/skin. . And Destiny 2 even comes out on top some days.

Since Destiny 2 itself is free to play (“free to play”), these sales primarily reflect the actual increase in pre-orders for The Final Shape. A few months ago, it was said that internally, Bungie was concerned about the low number of pre-orders for Final Shape. Now, developers are publicly celebrating these increases on the timeline. It’s quite a change of mood.

There’s a narrative that Bungie performs best when “their backs are against the wall”, which may sound heroic, but it’s pretty brutal, as it comes after laying off over 100 employees and it’s well known that Bungie’s internal leadership is poor, and all those leaders are still there, which means I’m not sure what the working conditions have been there recently. But in general, Bungie employees on the ground are adamant that they’re the proudest of anything they’ve done, and they can’t wait for people to play.

It’s been a perfect storm of good content and good marketing producing good vibes. The final form still needs to be enormously successful, not just “solid”, for Bungie’s health, and the game can’t lose too many players right after. But for now, things are on a very good track, that’s clear.

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